Thursday meetings

As Catclaw enters into high-gear, full-swing activity for the next year and beyond, we're now having weekly Thursday meetings to discuss where we're at and where we're going. Although these are meetings are intended primarily for staff, cast and crew, anyone curious about getting involved with Catclaw is welcome to attend.

This week's meeting will be at 1pm, February 12 at J. Gumbo's at 947 Baxter Avenue (near the intersection of Baxter Avenue, Bardstown Road, and Highland.)

Main topics of discussion will be A Year In the Death of Eddie Jester, fundraising plans, and moving our base of operations to bigger, better quarters.

We may go on a field trip afterwards to the Downtown Convention Center, which is a likely venue for some projects this year.

Super Explosive Intergalactic Grab Bag!

For our Etsy friends, Appalachian Voodoo Fibers is offering this grab bag package of fiber batts for yarn spinners, as a Catclaw fundraiser!

George Robert Bailey

George Robert Bailey will star in the title role of Patrick Amsterdam, Jeffrey Scott Holland's new short play about a failed washed-up lounge singer. The play is part of the Finnigan's Festival at the Rudyard Kipling in April.

Previously, George has played Captain Harrigan in The Moon Sees Somebody for Juneteenth, King Sextamus in Once Upon A Mattress for Hayswood Theatre in Corydon, Clown #1 in Catclaw's Toulouse-inations, and the prank-call victim in Brian Walker's Dirty Sexy Derby Play at the MeX Theater. He's also done a number of indie films such as Mountain Mafia, Fourteenth Floor Failure, and Fade to Gray's Perceptions, and appeared on A&E's Gene Simmons Family Jewels.

Free Cheeseburger & Fries MP3s

In preparation for the opening date of the Cheeseburger & Fries play being announced very soon, we're cooperating with Creeps Records to release the original musty old Cheeseburger & Fries cassette recordings on archive.org's Open Source Audio project.

You can click here to peruse the Cheeseburger & Fries mp3 files made available for free online.

Jeffrey Scott "Cheeseburger" Holland and J.T. "Fries" Dockery made hundreds of raw, obnoxious, primitive recordings between 1995-2002 as a street-busking duo, whose musical principles often including making up spontaneous stream-of-consciouness songs on the spot. All their performances (which were recorded on low-budget handheld tape recorders) are being preserved and archived today by Creeps Records and The Telecrylic Foundation.

Catclaw will be staging Holland's play about his street-musician years this summer, and more information will be announced here very shortly.

(Pictured above: Cheeseburger & Fries standing in the middle of U.S. 25 in Rockcastle County, KY.)

Kentucky Horror Hosts

The Unusual Kentucky blog has a couple of interesting recent features up this weekend about local television "horror hosts" of yesteryear - Millicent B. Ghastly's Monsterpiece Theater and Sammy Terry's Nightmare Theater.

Catclaw to abandon A-440 tuning?

Jeffrey Scott Holland's on-again, off-again jazz band, The JSH Combo, have announced their intention to join the growing movement to revert back to the traditional musical tuning of A=432hz. This was the proper Pythagorean standard in classical music until 1938, when the pitch was rounded up to A-440.

Verdi pressed the Italian Parliament to set the standard tuning at A 432 hertz, but in the century since, standard pitch has kept climbing higher and higher. In Berlin, orchestras tune to an A around 448 hertz. In Moscow, the symphony's pitch is even higher, near 450 hertz.

It remains to be seen whether JSH's new tuning policy applies to Catclaw as well.

(photo: Opera Verdi Europa's 2005 production of Verdi's Macbeth.)

Hound Dog Press

Catclaw is proud to be working with Hound Dog Press for all future printed materials, including business cards, posters, handbills, and what have you. Their old-old-old-school letterpress printing equipment has precisely the mythic resonance we seek.

They're located in the Mellwood Art Center to the right of the front gates and we urge anyone in search of quality letterpress printing to check 'em out! We can't recommend them highly enough.